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February 2017

Sunday Night Journal, February 26, 2017

In his review of SHEL, the group and the album, Robert Gotcher mentioned that their second album "is not nearly as good. They seem to have lost some of the innocence from the first album." I was reminded of this review, which I wrote ten years ago, of the first album by a group called Au Revoir Simone. The group consists of three young women (not quite so young now, obviously). The album is called Verses of Comfort, Assurance, and Salvation.

... this is a girlish album, and I mean that as a compliment: it’s sweet, though not the least bit sugary, and full of hope and longing, as young girls ought to be, rather than prematurely jaded and embittered by having given themselves too soon and too often to the unworthy. There are some indications here that they may have started down that road. This male listener who’s undoubtedly more than old enough to be their father feels protective toward them, gets a welcome touch of emotional springtime from their music, and hopes they don’t eventually give us Verses of Sarcasm, Anger, and Depression.

I haven't heard any of their subsequent work so I don't know how things have turned out for them. But what I was thinking of in those remarks, and what I speculate might be in evidence in SHEL's second album, is a phenomenon I've often noticed: more young women seem to be more disillusioned, often bitter and angry, than was the case not just when I was young but when I was middle-aged. And the more they seem to have embraced the sexual revolution the more angry they seem. I can't support that as anything more than a personal observation, and maybe it's a mistaken impression, but it certainly seems that way. I've noticed it since my own generation reached its late twenties or so, actually. 

Though now that I think about it I believe the impression that the phenomenon is growing comes more from the media than from real life. I mean young women in the media talking about themselves and their friends, and those are predominantly feminist, and feminists are generally angry, so maybe that's all it is. 

It looks to me in fact as if at least as many young men are pretty unhappy, too. The war between the sexes seems more like a war than it once did. The sexual revolution has given people a lot of pleasure, but I can't see that it's made them any happier. When I think of my parents' generation, people born in the 1920s, marrying and having children in the '40s and '50s, I don't see an idyllic world, but neither do I see the misery that's now held to be typical of the time. 

Maybe the epitaph of late American civilization will be "They had a lot of fun, but they weren't very happy." 


I've been thinking about the totalitarian propensities of contemporary liberalism (please insert standard clarification about classical liberalism etc. etc.), something which I've written about here before and which we've discussed. Whether what we now call liberalism in this country could ever become truly totalitarian--I mean thoroughly and violently repressive, in the way of fascism and communism--I'm not sure. If we include the entire left, there certainly are elements that would seem to be quite willing to use violence, and there certainly are elements which clearly want to enforce very rigid ideological conformity. 

But most dedicated liberals are nice people who don't condone or even dream about using violence (although I wonder if that's changing). And they're not big fans of the little fanatics who are in the news regularly for their attempts to shout down any and all opposing views. What they are, I think, is best described by the word devout. They have a religion to which they are passionately devoted, and as with any devotees, they want everyone to share their faith, and for everything around them to reflect it. 

There are some excellent examples of the syndrome in this piece by Kevin Williamson: progressivism, he says, is totalitarian the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.

Maybe a better word than totalitarianism would be totalism. (I didn't invent the word but it doesn't seem to have been used this way.) The liberal faith is, for its adherents, so very and obviously right, so clearly the path toward a far better life for everyone, that it should permeate everything, just as Christianity permeated medieval Europe. If the goal is an ever-nearer approach to global utopia which requires unity for its achievement, then every person who isn't with the program is not just a lost soul but an obstacle to everyone else's salvation.

And it should certainly be very important to personal relationships. I've seen at least two instances in print of liberals openly expressing a desire for segregation on the basis of politics, though of course they didn't use the word. I can't remember where I read one of them, possibly in the local paper when we still subscribed. It was about a small college town--Oxford, Mississippi, I think--which has a strong literary culture, and of course literary people tend to be liberal in politics, and to assume that all literary people are. And someone talking about how wonderful her neighborhood was said: "It's a street where everybody is a Democrat." That was striking to me. I have no idea at all what the politics of my neighbors are (except for the one house whose lawn sprouted a Trump sign late in the last campaign), and I don't care, and I won't care unless they badger me about it.

The other was in The Atlantic, and thanks to their online archive I can tell you exactly when it appeared and what it said. It was in the December 2013 issue, and the title of the piece is "Do Democrats Make Better Neighbors?". To my thinking anyone who even asks a question like that has thereby indicated that he is much too obsessed with politics. The writer describes his own neighborhood:

But in the past 10 years, the neighborhood has regained much of its leafy, prosperous sheen, drawing families and young people alike. Hobart Street, where I live, celebrates this newfound identity with an annual block party featuring bouncy houses as well as drag queens. Residents kick off a parade by reciting: “I pledge allegiance to Hobart Street Northwest … gay or straight, woman or man, all are welcome on Hobart Street—except for Republicans.”

Substitute some other group for Republican in that and see how it sounds. I give the author credit for at least noting that it might be a problem.


Something astonishing from the Washington Post: they take seriously the claims of an obscure Christian minister in a Florida town that he has detected demonic activity. This is normally the kind of thing that the Post and any other sophisticated news organization would sneer at if it happened to come to their notice. Why does this guy get a sympathetic hearing? Oh, I see: these demons are pro-Trump.

I don't think news media like the Post are even capable of seeing how partisan they are, and how much it distorts their reporting. As everybody knows, I guess, the Obama administration issued a requirement that all schools that receive federal funding must allow students to use whatever restroom they want, depending on what gender they wish to claim. Trump has said that he will rescind that rule. The Post's headline on a story about that: 


Never any hint that much of the objection to the rule came from concerns that girls would not be protected. It's really quite remarkable how the concerns of and for girls and women instantly became silly when a newer and apparently more victim-y victim class came into the picture. Worse than silly--intolerant and very bad, as David French says.


Pope Francis was widely misquoted last week. You probably saw the headlines, usually something like "Pope Says Better to Be An Atheist Than a Hypocritical Christian." That sentiment was in fact expressed in his talk, but it was attributed to those who are scandalized by hypocritical Christians: 

And so many Christians are like this, and these people scandalize others. How many times have we heard--all of us, around the neighbourhood and elsewhere--"but to be a Catholic like that, it’s better to be an atheist."

That sort of bad witness seems more important than ever, with the culture at large tending more and more toward hostility to Christians. The talk, of which you can read more here, contains some strong words useful as we begin Lent:



Well, I really didn't intend to talk so much about our collapsing culture this week. Here's something that's not collapsing: the right leg of this Canadian goose. (That's the name of the species. I cannot actually verify that the goose has ever been a resident of Canada.) Not a very good picture, but good enough for you to see that it's standing on one leg. It stood that way for at least five minutes or so while I tried to get close enough to get a picture without scaring it away. How is that even possible? The bird probably weighs at least ten pounds, and most of that weight is, as you can see, hanging in the air unsupported while the unsupportee gazes at the water.






Week8-Hi-fi in focus



And he’s fast.


Here is “El Cumbachero.” 

One of my favorites is “Walk, Don’t Run”. 




Compared with Segovia.


I still have the LP.


Sunday Night Journal, February 19, 2017











--Anthony Esolen, in Magnificat















52 Albums, Week 7: Something Else (The Kinks)





I am a dull and simple lad
Cannot tell water from champagne
And I have never met the Queen
And I wish I could have all he has got
I wish I could be like David Watts



And I curse myself for the life I’ve led
And roll myself a Harry Rag and put myself to bed



The doctors won't let me see her
But I can catch a glimpse through the doorway
Of the girl that I love and care for
I see you peering through frosted windows
Eyes don't smile, all they do is cry





--Mac is the proprietor of this blog.

Even Unto Death (A Guest Post)

Yesterday, I started to write a comment on the Favorites of the Year thread saying that my problem with the thread was that every find that I had last year was a movie or book that I learned about on this blog, so everyone else already knew about them, and we had already discussed them. Then I remembered a song I had heard by Audrey Assad, and then another.

A while back I got an email from my friend Sheila in which she mentioned that she was listening to Audrey Assad's Death Be Not Proud over and over again. So, I listened to it, and bought it. It is based on John Donne's sonnet of the same name.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally

At that time Ms. Assad had written about this song on her website and she said that she had written the song after several of her pregnant friends had miscarried. I read this in October, 2015, at which time my daughter had miscarried twice in about four months.

Then when Sheila and I traveled to North Carolina in the Fall of 2016, she brought along another album by Audrey.Assad, Inheritance, which includes the song, "Even Unto Death." This is a song which Ms. Assad, the daughter of a Syrian refugee (he came here as a child with his single, refugee mother), wrote after seeing the video of the 21 Coptic men who were executed by the Islamic State in February, 2015. I had never watched this video before because I didn't want to see anyone beheaded.

The video below contains the song, and part of the video of the martyrs—not the beheading—and Ms. Assad's explanation of the song. If you haven't seen the original video, you ought to watch this. Those men, except for maybe one, do not look like I would if I were about to be beheaded. They seem very calm and prepared for their deaths. When they first walk onto the beach and sink to their knees as one body, it is more like a liturgy than an exercise in violence, and as they kneel there with their executioners behind them, it is reminiscent of catechumens at Easter vigil with their sponsors.

When I had typed most of my comment, which was a great deal shorter than this, on the blog, I noticed that the two songs had a common theme, and it is a theme that anyone who has read much will recognize as being a recurrent theme for me.

I have planned close to a hundred funerals over the past three and a half years, and I have read all the readings that the Church has chosen for funerals aloud to the families many, many times. My favorite is from 1 Corinthians 15.

Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O Death is your victory?
Where, O Death is your sting?

I love to read this at a funeral, I read it at my mother's funeral. I love to stand there and look Death in the eye and spit. (I would never spit in real life. I'm a Southern lady after all.)

However, about two months while I was reading this to a family, I almost caught my breath in the middle of the scripture. Because now it's different. Now it's not my 89 year old mother, or even my own death that's in the balance, but my infant granddaughter. If she had died, I would not have escaped that sting. And yet I know that even in that case, Death would not have had the final word.

Thankfully, she is doing very well, and we are all beginning to breathe a lot easier.

I'm posting this here instead of on my blog because I wanted to post more-or-less anonymously, although anyone who reads this blog with any frequency knows who wrote this. I just don't want it to be easily found by a Google search because I don't want to intrude on my daughter's privacy.

While I was in the middle of writing this, I got an email that a friend—not a close friend, but a sister in Christ—has died. Her name is Flo. Please say a prayer for the repose of her soul when you read this.


Sunday Night Journal, February 12, 2017






























52 Albums: Week 6, SHEL


I used to be one of those people who thought the Beatles were the best musicians ever. I thought their compositions, arrangements, instrumentation, etc. were genius. My opinion of them has diminished considerably in the past few years. Now I find their music to be simplistic. McCartney is a great tune-smith and their instrumental work is very good, even creative (although not genius), but the lyrics are often trite or sophomoric, relying on adolescent cleverness. The arrangements were undoubtedly ahead of their time for rock ’n’ roll groups, but they certainly weren’t using many “tricks” that hadn’t already been pioneered by Bing Crosby, Les Paul, Chet Atkins, or even Phil Spector. The Beach Boys were much better at innovations in complex compositions, arrangements and harmonies (see Pet Sounds).

Two things helped change my opinion. First, my kids and I embarked on a multi-year deep study of music, both classical and popular. I listened to a lot of Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, etc. Plus, I listed to a lot of really good country music, swing, blues, American standards, etc. The Beatles just didn’t compare. I began to be irritated at McCartney’s brag about not knowing how to read music. How is that a good thing?

The second thing that helped change my mind happened in May of 2014. My son posted the following video on FB.


I was immediately captivated by the musicality, the instrumentation, the vocals and harmonies and the lyrics. Eva Holbrook seemed to have captured the experience of a pre-teen crush on a young man who was spending time with a young woman. The perspective is perfect, including the way the girl notices the woman’s “pretty shoes.” The video (produced by Sarah Holbrook) was great.

I began to listen to the rest of the album from which it came. I felt that these girls on their first album equaled or beat anything the Beatles had done. Admittedly, most of them were already in their early or mid-20s when they recorded this album, rather than barely or not even out of the teens, like the Beatles.

SHEL is four Holbrook sisters from Fort Collins, Colorado. The name comes from their first names: Sarah, Hannah, Eva, and Liza. Their instruments are in order violin, keyboard, mandolin, and percussion. I am especially impressed not only by their superior competence on their individual instruments (including Liza on percussion), but by the way their arrangements weave the four sounds together. The mandolin really adds to the uniqueness of their style. Eva is really good, as can be heard on “Tuscany.” The harmonies add to the beauty of already complex compositions.

The album is decidedly melancholy. There is lots of pain and unrequited love. The first cut, “Paint My Life,” is sparser and darker than you would expect on the first cut of a first album. It is haunting. The second cut, “Like Minded Fool,” begins with a line that perfectly matches the melody:

Go tell my friends I fell again.
They’ll lift me up and set my broken wings to the wind.

Some of the songs are almost too painful (“Stained”).

Your cold strike took me by surprise
I used to see love when I looked in your eyes
Take what's left and run from this life
Leave this slow death behind

The lyrics, although they do veer into triteness at times (“Vinyl Memories,” “On My Way”), are often poetically rich and psychologically insightful. “Wise Old Owl” expresses the angst of a woman who wants to know why she keeps failing at love, but when she asks the Wise Old Owl, all he says is: “Ooh woo, ooh woo, ooh woo, ooh woo.”

I especially like “When the Dragon Came Down,” a fantasy from the perspective of a king whose Queen and kingdom were destroyed by a dragon.

Lay your head down, close your eyes
Sleeping on a golden bed, cold as ice
Oh is she really gone
I lost my queen along with my crown
When the Dragon came down
Oh deep within my sleep
Awakened by the sound of her scream
The Dragon came down like a dream

The lyrics in this one are at times enigmatic, which I usually don’t like, but it works here.

One of the best cuts on the album is a cover of Led Zepplin’s “Battle of Evermore.” Their version beats by a long shot both Led Zepplin’s original from Led Zepplin IV and the famous Heart cover. Compare them:

Led Zepplin



Another interesting comparison is between “The Man Who Was the Circus” and the Beatles “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”



SHEL’s song really has depth compared to the triteness of the Beatles' song.

The most fun song on the CD, but not the vinyl, is light-hearted and frivolous, “The Latest and Greatest Blueberry Rubber Band.” It is just plain silly, to quote Veggie Tales. This version is not the one that appears on the CD. 

SHEL’s second album, Just Crazy Enough, is not nearly as good. They seem to have lost some of the innocence from the first album. Plus, it is much more “pop.” The songs and arrangements are simpler and more repetitive. I hope they return to the richness of their first album.

I know that my musical tastes differ significantly from many of the people on this blog, but I hope at least you like steam punk.

Here’s a picture of the Gotchers with SHEL at their concert in Green Bay in August, 2014. Who would have thought that I would become the fan of a new group at 55!

Week6-SHEL-Gotchers and SHEL


Sunday Night Journal, February 5, 2017

I'm beginning to suspect that Jean-Luc Godard is an over-rated filmmaker. Or at least that I don't care very much for his work. Maybe ten years ago I saw Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part), and really liked it. But I suspect that may have been only because of a few charming scenes involving the beautiful and charming Anna Karina. I haven't seen it again so I'm not sure. Then I saw Breathless, and came pretty close to disliking it. I don't have a lot of patience any more for the romantic and glamorous criminal business. Yes, I suppose  that has something to do with the fact that I'm not romantic or glamorous or criminal, but even in my old age I find it a little depressing that chicks go for that type. (I also saw Weekend sometime back around 1970 or so, and thought it was sort of crazy, but I'll withhold current judgment on it until or unless I see it again.)

And then this week I saw Alphaville. I had put it on our Netflix queue years ago. Really, years--I put it on there in a burst of enthusiasm when we first signed up, but then kept putting other things ahead of it. And it finally made its way to the top only because I forgot to put the next series of Vera ahead of it.

It's a sort of science-fiction movie with a few film-noir trappings. The city of Alphaville is the totalitarian governing metropolis of some sort of giant civilization, apparently an interplanetary one--the term "galaxies" is thrown around but in a way that doesn't make much sense. A secret agent from the Outlands has been dispatched to the city with orders to assassinate a scientist who is in charge of a computer called Alpha 60 which is in the process of becoming the real governing entity.

There's nothing wrong with that as the premise of a movie, but I don't think this one is very well executed. There are absolutely no special effects, and all the action takes place in what is obviously a contemporary (that is, 1964) city. The secret agent initially appears driving a Mustang. I don't know whether Godard wanted to do it this way or just didn't have money to build some sort of futuristic environment. And maybe that's just as well, considering the state of special effects etc. at the time. But it lends a slightly ludicrous quality to some of the dialogue. More fundamentally, if the story was meant to be genuinely exciting, it certainly failed for me. Almost everything about it was unconvincing to me. There is a lot of fairly conventional sermonizing about mechanization, automation, control, dehumanization, etc., mixed with heavy 20th-century-French profundity. I actually laughed out loud when our hero said, in an interior monologue:

Yes, it's always like that. You never understand anything. And one night you end it in death.

There were a few things I liked, most of all some really evocative photography of nighttime cityscapes and the cold empty interiors of office buildings and hotels. Anna Karina is there, playing Natasha, the daughter of the scientist, and there are many long looks at her lovely face. There is a long, really too long, scene, where the hero and Natasha are in a hotel room philosophizing and falling in love. And one device of the Alphaville environment struck me as a distinctive and still telling insight: dictionaries are treated like Bibles, but are constantly replaced with revised editions that omit some words as no longer permitted and add others that are now required. The hero finds that Natasha does not know the word "conscience." He tries to explain it to her, and she says something like "I feel that I know this word although I have never heard it." Yes--it's one of the things we can't not know.

Looking around on the net, I find that my view seems to be in the minority. Here's a more typical one, if you're interested. There is apparently some cultural context that I was not aware of: the agent is named Lemmy Caution, and is played by an American actor, Eddie Constantine, who was well-known for playing the same character in a series of crime dramas. 



 Years ago (I mean something like forty years) when I worked in a bookstore, we stocked the fiction of B. Traven. Or perhaps I should say The Mysterious B. Traven, as he is often described. Here is the beginning of his Wikipedia entry:

B. Traven (Bruno Traven in some accounts) was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), which was adapted for the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 1948.

I remember picking up one of his novels, The Cotton Pickers, one night in the store when nothing was going on, reading a little, and feeling a bit let down, because it didn't seem to promise anything as exciting as the vague mythology surrounding the author suggested. Then I got interrupted, and never went back to it. A month or two ago I saw The Cotton Pickers and another book, The Night Visitor, on the discard table at the local library, and grabbed them. 

Now I've read The Cotton Pickers, and that initial hasty impression of forty years ago seems to have been fairly accurate. I enjoyed it, but it's not a dramatic narrative, nor does it reach great psychological or philosophical depths. Insofar as it seems to have any aim beyond the picturing of a place and time and the telling of a story, that aim seems to be political: it is concerned with the oppression of the poor in Mexico (and by implication in the whole "capitalist" world). But it's not strident or plainly ideological, nor does it picture saintly poor people up against evil capitalists, so you never feel like you're reading a tract, but simply seeing things as they are. And in fact I would recommend it precisely as a social document, because it has the ring of truth, and it's good to be reminded sometimes, if one is inclined to forget it, of how deeply serious injustice is embedded in the world.

The story is set in rural Mexico, presumably in the 1920s when the novel was published. It's a loose first-person narrative of some months in the life of Gerard Gales, of whom we know nothing much except that he is "a white man," presumably American but possibly European, and is a vagabond without money or apparently any sort of stable life. The story opens with his arrival in a village where he desperately needs to find work. With a few other equally poor men he goes to work picking cotton. A good third or more of the book describes that experience. Later he puts in a bit of time at an oil field. He stays for a while in a little town, where he works in a bakery. He takes a job driving a herd of cattle to market. 

And that's it. There's no cumulative narrative, just a series of incidents peopled by characters who come and go. Only at the very end of the book is there a suggestion that there may be more purpose in his wanderings than meets the eye, and I'm not sure about that. It's very low-key, and Gales's voice is wry and ironic. I might even call it light, but in retrospect, I'm left with a cumulative effect of seriousness, as much picture as story, and a very vivid one. A blurb on the dust jacket of my copy says that Traven does what Hemingway only tried to do, but this book, at least, doesn't strike me that way. It doesn't have Hemingway's grim seriousness and self-conscious heroic fatalism.

Now I want to read Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which unfortunately was not on that discard table.

One reason I read this book before the other is the subject, with which I have a personal connection: I'm one of a dwindling number of people in this country who have actually had the experience of picking cotton all day. The title in German is amusing: Die Baumwollpflücker. Good thing I never called anybody that in the cotton field.


I can deal with people making cheap political points by way of slogans, "memes," and the like. Well, that's not entirely true. I can't really deal with them, but I can usually manage to change the mental subject and ignore them. What really drives me up the wall is when they think they've made a point, but it doesn't even make sense. I've long thought that "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries" was some kind of champion among that species. But I saw one a day or two ago that beats it: "The Constitution Has No Alternative Facts." The one about rosaries makes no direct sense; it's only word-association, but at least you can discern a connection between the words and a sentiment: the Catholic Church is trying to oppress me. I cannot find anything resembling a thought in the new one, though. I know what it means, of course: I don't want Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. But is there any connection between that and a dig at Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" remark about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration? Well, there I go, doing what I really must stop myself from doing: trying to point out illogic in a context where logic is irrelevant. It's a trap. 


More and more often, in journalism and in the writing of young people in general (not real writing, but Internet postings of one sort or another), I notice misspellings indicating that the writer has only heard the word, not seen it in print, and is spelling it phonetically. This one caught my eye in a local news story the other day: 

 “She goes bizzurk, stabbing a gas station attendee in the neck and then goes across the street and attacks a female pharmacist, literally beating her to a pulp,” Nancy Grace said during a 2010 show.

I'm assuming this was the reporter's transcription, not an official one from the TV network (Nancy Grace is a TV "personality.") 



January 9, 2017

52 Albums: Week 5 - Rain Dogs

Imagine my surprise. Although I had read about it in Rolling Stone magazine and bought the cassette tape soon upon its release I was not prepared for the first song, or many thereafter. Rain Dogs sounded shockingly original and amazingly good, and since then I have collected through the years most of Tom Waits’ other recordings.

There was a time several years ago when he went on some sort of limited tour and came to Mobile. I was flying out to El Paso so could not attend. Strangely he played El Paso too, but I missed that show as well. Friends in both cities enjoyed the concert and told me tales. Who goes on tour and puts Mobile, Alabama and El Paso, Texas on their itinerary? Apparently, Tom Waits does. I may never see him in concert.

But there are the recordings. Through the years and buying his music I found out that Waits began as sort of a beatnik poet singer, speaking and singing lazily amusing and nice songs. Something happened around the time he decided to record Swordfishtrombones, the album which precedes Rain Dogs. I’m not sure what happened, but I sure do like it.

Waits sings in a rough way, he sings about dispossessed people and their circumstances, he and his musicians use real instruments that were not being used by just about anyone else I might have been listening to in 1985. If we try to remember music in the mid-80s it is not entirely heartening; there were smooth pop vocals with synthesizers, and artists wearing make-up with perhaps their hair sculpted in a certain way. They were not all bad, but they are not very memorable. The good music remains from that era, of course. But no one else was like Waits.

Take the opening stanza from “Cemetery Polka”:

Uncle Vernon
Uncle Vernon
Independent as a
Hog on ice
He’s a big shot down there
At the slaughterhouse
He plays accordion
For Mr. Weiss

There’s more to consider in those few lines than in the entirety of most songs, but what jumps out to me when I hear it is, “He’s a big shot down there at the slaughterhouse”. Who says this? I can hear Waits’ voice telling me this in conversation, but I cannot hear it coming out of my own mouth. Not only is Uncle Vernon in charge down at the slaughterhouse, but after hours he’s apparently playing the accordion somewhere for this Weiss character.

Glancing at the Wikipedia page for the album, along with the accordion here are some other instruments used to make the wonderful sounds on Rain Dogs: pump organ, harmonium, marimba, trombone, trumpet, baritone sax, tenor sax, double bass, parade drum … you get the point. Missing Persons and The Human League did not use any of these instruments for their recordings. These “real instruments” give the album an earthy, sometimes New Orleans kind of feel, punctuated with Tom’s ever-changing vocals sometimes barked, crooned, growled, spit … and other ways that don’t quickly come to mind. It is all quite affecting, reverberating, and memorable. Some of the music has a calliope feel to me … I write that and I’m not really sure what it means, but I think I am correct.

There are a few songs on the album that are for the most part sung “straight”, as in he just sings them and what makes them different from his previous (previous to Swordfishtrombones, that is) recordings is more the backup music. Two of these are: “Time”, and “Downtown Train”. The former has a line that for some reason I’ve been thinking of now for 30 years, and to me is wonderfully poetic:

And you’re east of East St. Louis
And the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause

The latter was covered by Rod Stewart in 1989 and became a hit single for him. A lot of Waits is covered by other artists. I think his songs are so interesting to other artists because, a) the lyrics tend to be interesting, and b) they know that their versions will sound nothing like Waits. Songs covered and sung the same way as the original are just not as compelling. I sort of like Rod’s version more than the original.

Back during the time that this album had come out and I was driving around Miami in my Ford Pinto listening to it a lot through a sad little improvised cassette deck situation I had going, a friend of mine named John decided to get into a fracas while driving with a crazy woman. John was/is of course crazy too, and I was present during the episode. So, I’m driving down I-95 to the courthouse in downtown Miami to give a deposition which eventually helped to have the entire thing thrown out of court and not adversely affect John’s medical school career (yes, he is now a doctor!) listening to Rain Dogs in my Pinto. The song “Gun Street Girl” has a refrain, which goes:

I said John, John he’s long gone
Gone to Indiana
Ain’t never coming home

I’m not sure why the “John” in the song was “gone to Indiana”, but all I could think is that my friend John would be sent to some sort of penitentiary there. It was a bad omen which luckily did not come true (I think his patients like him).

Those are all the musings I can come up with about Rain Dogs. The fun thing about this series is I feel the need to listen several times to an album before writing about it. It had been a long time since I listened to Rain Dogs, but BOY is this album good! I found myself driving slowly to work the first morning, wanting to delay my arrival and hear more music. Waits isn’t for everyone, but if you like him I believe this is a very good place to start.

TomWaits-Rain Dogs-Stu_html_m78c60285

Album cover


Waits singing title song in concert

—Stu Moore is an occasional contributor to this blog. He likes literature and music and tries not to think about politics.